Why Home Alone Is a Conservative Movie

I t is a ritual in any essay on conservatism to ask readers what conservatism is trying to conserve. An eight-year-old boy brimming with booby traps offered an answer in 1990 as eloquent as any from a conservative intellectual before or since: his home. “This is my house. I have to defend it,” Kevin McCallister firmly states in Home Alone before arming his house with icy stairs, a plummeting iron, a searing doorknob, and chicken feathers, among various ruses, to fend off two bad guys, Marv and Harry, seeking to pillage his family members’ toys and gadgets during their vacation in Paris.

Home Alone is considered to be a Christmas classic but not a conservative one. It was not on National Review’s 2008 list of the top 50 conservative movies. It avoids politics. Both liberals and conservatives love the movie. But after watching it for the 30th (or is it the 50th?) time during the Christmas season, I realized it embodies the best of the conservative tradition.

First, Home Alone celebrates the family, and large families — and large, imperfect families at that. The McCallisters are a close-knit, if rambunctious, gaggle of seven. Yet the portrayal of the McCallister lineage goes beyond the nuclear family, for it depicts not only fathers, mothers, and their children but also uncles, aunts, and cousins.

Furthermore, family is the ultimate source of comfort for Kevin. After being ordered by his mother to sleep in the attic the night before his family’s flight to Paris, following a pizza fight instigated by his older brother Buzz at the dinner table, Kevin declares, “I don’t want another family. I don’t want any family. Families suck!”

Upon realizing that his family had indeed left him at home, Kevin immediately delights in the thrill of unlimited freedom: jumping on his parents’ bed eating popcorn, sledding from the top of the stairs out the front door, and inhaling ice-cream sundaes while watching scary movies. Yet a sense of loneliness gradually dawns on him as a consequence of the aimless pleasures and social isolation. The scene of Kevin gazing longingly at a family photo while sitting on his parents’ bed shows that he misses his family, but it also conveys a deeper conservative lesson: The family guards against social estrangement. One can possess all the individual autonomy in the world and yet feel empty in the heart and soul when sundered from kinship networks that give us meaning and purpose.

We also hold involuntary moral duties to our family. Kevin eventually decides to perform chores, such as shopping for groceries and washing and drying the family’s laundry, even though he could have chosen not to complete them. Human beings have fixed obligations to each other that are not the product of voluntary consent. Kevin had to defend his home. He had no choice.

Yet this all seems so strange: Kevin constantly bickers with his siblings, exchanges insults with them, and doesn’t display any kindness toward them in the opening scenes of the movie. Why then does he long for his family members when they are gone?

Because of something Edmund Burke, the great British philosopher-statesman, called “just prejudice.” Just prejudice is the collected wisdom of social affections, customs, and rituals that compose any cultural inheritance, even if they cannot be fully rationalized. The family is the paragon of just prejudice: We hold natural sentiments of attachment to our family members, even if we quarrel with them, for reasons that exceed our full comprehension. Home Alone’s depiction of the relationship between Kevin and his mom is the classic case. Although they fight the night before the McCallisters leave for Paris, Mrs. McCallister is moved by her maternal instinct to get home as quickly as possible to hug Kevin.

Kevin’s defense of his home is also a vivid example of just prejudice. His house was the vault of ugly memories: the fights, the squabbles, the taunts, the slurs. But it was his house — and his parents’ house, and his siblings’ house, replete with the barbs, yes, but also a resting place of warmth and tenderness amid the precarity of the outside world. Moreover, the bad guys, Marv and Harry, were the radical threat seeking to disrupt the established rituals of the house, including, most prominently, the McCallisters’ celebration of Christmas. Kevin’s defense of his home was a defense of the memory of his family, and of their immemorial traditions menaced by the ruthless — and rootless — home invaders.

Evil stared Kevin in the face, and Kevin stared right back. A kumbaya McCallister he was not, unswayed by utopians’ false confidence in dialogue to reason with the wicked. Kevin grasped the depth of Marv and Harry’s depravity and planned accordingly by setting out his elaborate booby traps with ingenuity and precision. Thinking about robbing a house this Christmas? Perhaps a nail through your tar-soaked bare foot will deter you. Or maybe a blowtorch to the head?

Finally, Home Alone demonstrates the importance of faith, and particularly the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. Near the end of the movie, prior to the battle scene at the McCallisters’ house, the movie shows Kevin attending a choir performance at the local church. He strikes up a conversation with Marley, his neighbor whom he had previously feared, about Marley’s estrangement from his son. Kevin encourages Marley to reconcile with him. Marley suggests Kevin do the same with his family. In the end, they both make amends with their respective relatives. Home Alone teaches that temporary grudges shrink beneath the awesome power of forgiveness.

If these lessons don’t scream political conservatism but rather commonsensical insights into the enduring significance of family, tradition, and faith regardless of ideological affiliation, that’s precisely the point: Conservatism, best understood, defends and appreciates the inherited wisdom of our timeless institutions and untaught affections — wisdom we take for granted even when it is playing right in front of our eyes on a television screen during the Christmas season, to the tune of an eight-year-old kid innocent enough to shriek from a cologne burn on his cheeks, but grateful enough to prepare the Christmas tree for when he is finally reunited with his family in a place called home, warmed by the embers of the fireplace.